One of Italy’s greatest treasures, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, will be exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum from Sept. 13 until Oct. 22. The extraordinary document, created ca. 1505, which explores bird flight and behavior, includes sketches and descriptions of devices and aerodynamic principles related to mechanical flight and foreshadows the invention of the airplane four centuries later.

The exhibit will be on view in a specially designed case located in The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age, an exhibition whose centerpiece is Orville and Wilbur Wright’s 1903 “Flyer,” the world’s first successful powered aircraft. Nearby interactive stations will allow visitors to virtually leaf through the 18 folios (2-sided pages) of the Codex, an early form of personal notebook. The document will be loaned to the museum by the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy, which owns a number of works by da Vinci.